A Guide to Not Being a Miserable B4st4rd!

Our lives move in patterns. Our minds are perfectly trained pattern machines, looking for the repeatable sets of steps, tasks and actions that lead us quickest to whatever the hell it is we want. If we didn’t have these patterns we’d have to relearn everything we do every time we do it.

For example, perhaps you will be one of the many who will blindly walk to their bus/train/car tomorrow and blindly travel to work and blindly walk into the office blindly repeating the same pattern as all the other working days in your week. Can I add, I mean nothing by ‘blindly’ apart from the fact you don’t think about it, it’s become an automatic pattern. Anyway, now think about what happens the minute your bus or train is late or the traffic is worse than usual? This is the feeling of your usual pattern being broken. It can be properly confusing!

However, there’s a problem with patterns because, not only do you have many positive patterns and your standard every day patterns (like the journey to work) but, you will also have a whole set of negative patterns. You know what they are without really having to think about them; the ‘same sh!t different day’ pattern, the ‘she’s a total b!tch’ pattern, the ‘I’m not good enough’ pattern, the ‘I feckin hate this job’ pattern, the ‘oh no, my life has become a never ending repeatable pattern’ pattern, etc. etc. (please feel free to add your own daily/weekly/monthly patterns here!!)

Anyway, I want to give you a wee bit of homework to help you break these patterns. I call it the ‘hmmm, that’s cool!’ pattern. Is really simple, all you need to do for the whole of this week is to spot where life is different from how you expect it, even if it is only for a second. I want you to spot the wee positive points in your day where work is actually quite fun, spot the moments of love, spot the moments of happiness, spot the things that make you smile, spot the person that is nice to you, spot the moment you do something excellent, spot anything and everything out of your ordinary and just say to yourself, as soon as it happens, ‘Hmmm, that’s cool!’ and maybe even gift yourself a wee smile at it. NB I would recommend saying this inside your own head or people may think you’ve gone slightly nuts.

That’s it, that’s all, nothing more. Once you’ve said ‘Hmmm, that’s cool!’ you can go back to being a miserable b4st4rd if you want to. I don’t care! Just make sure you say it when the wee moments happen.

Here’s my prediction, if you actually do it, you’ll be doing the ‘Hmmm, that’s cool!’ pattern many more times on Friday than you do tomorrow. Enjoy it, think about how cool it would be to have a week full of smiling.